Lieutenant Mary Sue Teaches Captain Kirk a Lesson
by Marie Suzette
Summary: See title for most succinct summary. Please note, this is not a parody, it is an actual Mary Sue fic.


Her mother named her Mary for the Magdalene and Susan for the suffragette. There were three other Mary's and two Susan's in her grade, however, so she quickly became known as Mary Sue instead.

Where a girl named after a historical figure who changed the world with her actions might have gone on to make history herself, Mary Sue was instead a staid, solid moniker. People named Mary Sue never did anything important. Instead, they were the type to wear pigtails and Mary Janes, to dutifully do what they're told, to plod along through life solemnly. Girls named Mary Sue have friends because she's a smart girl to have around, but don't have the vivacity or charm to actually be popular. In school, she's the girl who worked hard, paid attention in class, volunteered to answer questions, but always had grades a smidge lower than that other kid who goofed off in class but had "potential" when "applying" themselves and charmed the teacher so much they were forgiven their crimes.

Mary Sue lived up to her name. She studied hard and made good grades, and nobody was surprised when she was accepted to and chose Starfleet. A pseudomilitary (even if peacekeeping and exploration are the putative objectives these days rather than war and conquest, nobody is fooled) organization where regulation and rules were a critical aspect of day-to-day life – it seemed like some place she was bound to thrive.

And thrive she did. She was as dutiful and diligent a student as ever, and her instructors loved her for it. She was That Cadet, who knew the regulations by heart and was a swot about it. She wasn't Command Track, of course (she knew her strengths: leadership, original thought, and risk-taking were not among them) but ambitious reckless commander wannabes were a dime a dozen. Heroic to a fault, they were the Command Track's version of cannon fodder, doomed to a short but glorious career culminating in a noble sacrifice and a posthumous medal. The one who wised up fast enough to learn strategy and build stamina were the ones who would one day make Admiral.

* * *

><p>When she first heard the dashing tale of Jim Kirk, recent Hero of the Vulcan Crisis, she thought he was surely one of the former. She had some passing familiarity with his father's story (who didn't?), even having written a paper about it. More specifically, she wrote a paper about how if the commanding officer at the time had followed regulations instead of the actions he <em>did<em> take, then George Kirk's sacrifice wouldn't have been needed.

(And once, when an instructor had been especially upset with a comment she'd made in class, he'd assigned her to write an extra 5-page paper as punishment on why the non-regulatory actions of George Kirk had saved lives and why deviating from regulation had been the best action to take. She'd griped about the unfairness of it to her friends but she'd turned in a 20-page masterpiece with a 10-page bibliography. When she was given something to do, she did it well. And it wasn't like the _Kelvin_ Incident wasn't the most-frequently-discussed-in-dissertations incident in recent history. Her instructor had returned the paper to her nearly unmarked, with merely a query box in red font at the end. "Very nice literature review, but I'd hoped for something of your own thoughts. I'm disappointed." She later learned the instructor had been a survivor of the _Kelvin_ and owed his life to George Kirk. She'd printed out a paper version that she kept as an object lesson, though of what she still wasn't quite sure.)

Aside from the initial hubbub that spread through the Academy when news that George Kirk's legacy was indeed enlisting, she hadn't heard much of Jim Kirk. Then, he was accused of cheating on the _Kobayashi Maru_. She still remembered with clarity the disdain she'd felt at the news – the idea that George _Kirk_'s son would stoop to cheating on _this_ test.

Of course, then Vulcan had been destroyed and there had been a million other things to concentrate on and by the time she heard his name again, he was the poster boy of Starfleet. She'd laid a bet with her friends that he wouldn't last a year. She'd looked through reports of what had taken place on the _Enterprise_ and a man who makes reckless, if brilliant, decisions is a man who lives life to the fullest and dies young.

To her surprise, he did last a year, even if the _Enterprise_ was the ship with the highest success rate – and the most tragic mortality rates for their rare failures. She recognized the problem, of course. A captain who committed his all to each mission regardless of policy would have a higher-than-average success rate, but he would also overcommit resources even when it was clearly time to pull back.

That's what she told the Board when they called her to ask her opinion. She'd made Lieutenant by then, and developed somewhat of a reputation for being a stickler for the rules. She was called in specifically because she was to transfer onto the _Enterprise_, observe the crew in action, and report to the Board on her conclusions.

A distasteful assignment, but she would do what she was told.

* * *

><p>Judging from the reception when she beamed aboard, someone somewhere had leaked the true purpose of her assignment to the crew of the <em>Enterprise<em>. She wasn't surprised, really – this sort of assignment was entirely political. Even though the _Enterprise_ truly needed their mission protocol objectives reevaluated, nobody ever bothered to dispatch a spy on board unless some Admiral somewhere had gotten in a snit about something and wanted to pull one over on Captain Kirk. Of course, Captain Kirk likely had his own friends on the Board who'd delivered a warning, and with scuttlebutt traveling as quickly as it did, there wasn't a single person aboard the _Enterprise_ who didn't know her for what she was.

A snitch.

It didn't make her job any harder, of course. The crew was mixed between those trying to ignore her existence and those trying to perform extra-appropriately in front of her. The things she was instructed to look for, however, were things they couldn't easily hide.

She'd thought, for example, that assigning her to report on the rule-abiding nature of a crew where a _Vulcan_ (well, half-Vulcan, but the same thing, really) was on the command staff was bordering on the ridiculous. There was no insight she could offer that a Vulcan couldn't. She quickly found, however, that Commander Spock was … emotionally compromised. He put up a token fight when Kirk made outrageous decisions, of course, but the force of his logic was … weak. And his while his knowledge of regulation was impeccable, his application of it was … less so.

So of course, when she sat in one a strategic meeting (which as official snitch for the Board, she was obligated to attend, to the displeasure of everyone else) and Kirk proposed yet another reckless and nonregulation maneuver, she found that nobody else was willing to make a protest, she registered a formal objection.

Then ensued a verbal sparring match between herself and the Captain, where his voice raised higher than higher, and she reiterated again and again the reasoning behind Starfleet regulation.

Starfleet Regulation Section C Line 14 subsection (iv) states that in the event that Starfleet personnel are captured by a hostile civilization with whom Starfleet is in the middle of negotiating membership with, there are no rescue missions to be undertaken until _after_ all diplomatic channels (defined in Appendix C) have been exhausted because 1.) an attack could lead to full-blown war with a hostile civilization too weak to defend itself, leading to its utter annihilation by Starfleet, 2.) an attack could lead to full-blown war with a hostile civilization too advanced for an organization officially representing a nonmilitary capacity to interact with, and 3.) any incursion to non-Starfleet planetary soil constitutes an act of war that Starfleet is not authorized to make.

_No,_ there are no exceptions if the nearest Starfleet diplomatic vessel will take 36 hours to arrive, by which time the captured personnel could be dead.

_No_, there are no exceptions if the hostile civilization has already intimated that they will slaughter their captives within the next 24 hours.

_No_, there are no exceptions if the ten captured personnel include Lt. McCoy and Lt. Uhura, both of whom have served Starfleet nobly _and_ treated her best since her arrival on the _Enterprise_, and her proposition to abandon them makes her a "cold-hearted bitch."

As expected, the Captain shut her in the brig.

* * *

><p>After it was all over, the Captain came to visit her in her quarters with a bottle of whiskey.<p>

"I usually drink with Bones," he announced, "but he's got too many painkillers running through him right now. So I thought you might like an opportunity to gloat."

"To gloat, Captain Kirk? You rescued your personnel and didn't start a war in a process. Surely you're the one who's come to gloat?"

"I lost two men out there. Two fine men whose lives wouldn't have been at risk if I'd done what you said." At least the man wasn't ashamed to admit his mistakes, didn't try to push the blame of their deaths off onto someone else.

"Captain Kirk, do you know why I am on this ship?"

"Because Admiral Sacking still has a stick up his ass about what I got up to with his son in the storage closet at the last official function, and he wants to make my life miserable."

"That's why I was assigned to report on your actions. But do you know why I am now this ship?"

"No. Enlighten me. But have some whiskey first."

"Thank you. I shall."

Mary Sue poured herself a liberal glass. Technically, regulations didn't permit Starfleet officers to imbibe onboard, even while off-duty, with the very logical reasoning that you never knew when attack might happen and it was best to sober in that event. However, seeing as Kirk had stripped her of her rank right before throwing her in the brig and hadn't yet officially reinstated it, she technically wasn't an officer at this moment and did not need to follow those rules.

"It all boils down to this, Captain Kirk. You never passed the _Kobayashi Maru_."

"I-"

"You cheated. You didn't pass."

"It's a cheat. It's not a fair test."

"Do you know what the _Kobayashi Maru_ teaches you?"

"How to despair?" Kirk said brittlely. "The futility of trying to keep all your men alive?"

"Exactly." At his surprised look, she continued. "Unlike most of your exams, which I noticed you passed with more or less flying colors, the results of the _Kobayashi Maru_ are not something you can measure. Despite all the other people involved, this is not a test about what you do and who you save. The test doesn't begin until after the exam has ended. The _Kobayashi Maru_ is about self-discovery. First, you have to face what kind of person you are under pressure, you have to justify the decisions you made, you have to see how you react during a crisis. When you're done with all that, done with analyzing your actions and your thoughts inside and out, wondering if there's anything you can do better, the test is about whether or not you can live with your actions. The Captain of a starship, Captain Kirk, sends many people to their deaths. If you have a breakdown after each one, you'll quickly burn out and die alone and nameless among the stars."

She gave him a pointed look at this.

"You never took the _Kobayashi Maru_ as seriously as you ought, and this is why you're having so much trouble now. You never had to face yourself in quite the same way. You've had plenty of other soul-searching experiences, true, but those all taught you different lessons than the lesson the _Kobayashi Maru_ does."

"So you think I'll die alone and nameless?" Kirk said wryly.

"No, I don't," she said honestly. "You're a smart man. I've seen your test scores. And you seem to be a fast learner, too. I thought you'd burn out quickly when I first met you, but you're stronger than that. Admiral Pike certainly thinks so, which is why he was one of those that voted I be sent on this ship. To teach you an object lesson, to teach you to be stronger. And, I think, to remind you that rules exist for a reason. So you can avoid un-fun audits from people like me in the future."

"A hard lesson to learn." He sighed. "You seem to know what you're talking about. Maybe you should join on as a permanent officer after all this is said and done? Help me out with the concept of rules?" He quirked a wry grin.

"No," she said.

"No?"

"Captain Kirk, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the two men who died did so doing something incredibly heroic and sacrificed their lives so their teammates might live?"

"Yes."

"That's what you do. That's the example you set for your crew, and that's what you teach them. I was sent here ostensibly because you have a remarkably tragic mortality rate in your failed missions, few though they may be. And that mortality rate is the reason I consented to this assignment. You teach your crew to give everything their all, you _teach_ them to burn bright and burn quick, and they unsurprisingly burn out. Until you learn the importance of stamina, neither will they."

"I won't give anything less than my all to every mission, not when anything less could mean a death," Captain Kirk said.

"And there's nothing wrong with that, Captain. You live according to a set of principles that are admirable. But they are not ones I want to sign up for. I happen to be fond of breathing. So thank you for your offer, but when I've submitted my report, I will await my next assignment from the Board."

"Good luck with your assignment," Kirk said, gathered his glasses and turned to leave.

"Captain?"

"Yes?" Kirk turned around, expectant.

"It's been an honor."

"It's been an … education."


End file.
